Month: August, 2014

The vines by the creek must have been there years before I noticed them at 12 or 13. Invasive species, would climb a tree arm upon arm, like tefillin, until the tree’s back couldn’t bear it, snapped in half and hung, suspended in the veins of its parasite. While I was away, the whole woods disappeared — but left behind such beautiful houses.

“It was not possible to identify which parts belonged to the donkey & the girls” –Witness, Gaza, Palestine, 2009

Praise the Mohawk roof of the donkey’s good & gray head, praise its dangerous mane hollering out. Beneath her soft & mournful gray, still beneath the skull, where it is dusk, praise the rooms of the donkey’s eye & brain, its pulley & clang, this sound of hooves & the girls still saying words. Praise the girls still saying words, praise the girls, their hands, the hooves of their hearts hoofing against their opened chests opened on the open road plainly, praise the fat tongue’s memory of grass or hay, the hundred nights of animal sleep flung far from bodies, the sturdy houses of bones, all over the decimated road where every thing is flying, praise the deep, dark machine of the donkey’s eye, the girl’s eye, like a movie-house crumbling in a field outside of town—, praise the houses & the rocks it held once, the sky before & after the missile, praise the dark & donkey soul crossing over, every one, every hill & girl it ever saw, crossing over in the red suitcase of its blood, into the earth, praise the donkey earth, earth of girls, earth of funerals & girls, praise the small, black luggage of the donkey’s eye in a field, flung far, filling the ants & birds with what it saw.